


The Cuckoo In The Nest

by AsheRhyder



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mild Gore, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 10:50:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10489200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsheRhyder/pseuds/AsheRhyder
Summary: After five years, Reaper was finally ready to come face to face with the head of Talon, the one who orchestrated the downfall of Overwatch like a ruinous symphony.What he found would have stopped his heart if he wasn’t already dead.





	

    Five years.

    It took five years to get to this point.

    Five years of bloody hands, dirty deeds, and soul-rotting jobs that turned every horrible thing said about him into truth. Five years of wearing a mask, five years of digging in shadows for secrets and lies and betrayals.

    It took five years, but Reaper was finally going to meet the head of Talon, a person who hid their trail better than any black-ops agent. Most of the agency only knew their leader as “The Commander”, getting their orders through various lieutenants or automated systems. Several of those lieutenants asked him about joining properly, but Reaper scoffed.

    “I don’t make that kind of deal with middle management.” He always growled. He couldn’t, not when he wanted to rip out the throat of the person at the top. Whenever he decided to make his move, he’d only get once chance to avenge Overwatch and the ideals it once upheld. He didn’t have the luxury of languishing in the rank and file.

 

    But finally, after five years, it was time.

 

    The meeting was slated for the Commander’s private office. Security escorted Reaper through the halls of an abandoned Blackwatch base to a part that had never been on any blueprints. They removed his weapons and debated over the clawed, spiked gauntlets, finally deciding to let him keep them when he started peeling back one plate and the graying, decaying flesh peeled away with it. He was escorted through a long hallway with security seals, across a deep pit some creative designer built into the structure, and into the windowless, foreboding chamber that stood like an island in the center. The island rotated slowly, and the bridge and the door online lined up for a short time. The automatic door, Reaper noticed as he passed through it, was several inches thick and sealed airtight.

    Inside, the office had the sleek, minimalist decor of nearly a century earlier, with smooth, featureless panels and few visible seams. It lacked personal touches beyond the odd sense of antiquity; the most noticeable of these being the phone on the otherwise cleared desk. The chair behind the desk faced away from him, and all that Reaper could see of its occupant was one gloved hand that waved him further in.

    “Well now,” said a voice distorted by computerized enhancement. “What have we here? The legendary Reaper.”

    Reaper stood silent, trying to decipher the odd roll to the speaker’s accent that the synthesizer couldn’t quite hide.

    “You’re a difficult man to woo,” said the Commander. “I’ve had people asking you for years now.”

    Reaper waited, motionless.

    “I reviewed your file. Not a lot known about you, is there?” Holographic screens popped up on every wall, turning the boss’s statement to a lie. Every job Reaper ran, every bullet he spent, every drop of blood he shed, all of it hung before him in terrible, glowing letters, pictures, and even video. Reaper said nothing, but now it was because he couldn’t draw breath to do so. The largest image hung on the wall in front of the desk, a massive picture of the Blackwatch logo. Apprehension ate away at the rage as the symbol faded away to reveal the face of Gabriel Reyes.

    “Why don’t we both take off our masks?” The Commander said, almost conversationally but for the picture on the wall taunting Reaper with his past.

    “What’s the point?” Reaper growled, but his mind raced as he tried to figure out how to spin this.

    The chair swiveled around.

    “Oh, I think there might be a pretty interesting one, if you cared to look,” said the man in the chair.

 

    Reaper’s brain hit what used to be called “The Blue Screen Of Death”. Every higher thought process screeched to a halt. It was impossible. There was no way.

    But at the same time, there was a sickening kernel of _sense_ in the madness.

   

    Who remembered the name, the face, the moves of a man long dead?

    Who recognized and replicated the skills and tactics of a black-ops organization that wasn’t supposed to exist?

    Who was there, who saw it happening, who saw what was coming?

    _Who got out of there before it all went down in flames?_

 

    “Howdy, _jefe,_ ” said McCree.

 

    He looked different, which was ridiculous because he hadn’t even trimmed his beard, let alone changed out of his iconic cowboy gear. Perhaps that was the reason; here they stood, in a place that represented the heart of every rotten thing that tore Overwatch from its golden pedestal, and he seemed completely comfortable. Relaxed, even.

    “You don’t actually have to unmask if it’s a problem,” said McCree, just shy of condescending. “I saw what happened with your gauntlet.”

    “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Reaper growled.

    McCree’s mouth quirked into a too sharp smirk.

    “C’mon. It’s right there on my hat. Big damn raptor, looks like a capital letter T…”

    “No.”

    “Wasn’t best pleased when my boys decided to hijack that train like that. Flashy. Gets too much attention.” McCree shook his head. “Subtlety, I told ‘em. It’s a delicate operation. I got no use for fools who think subtlety means melting their way onto a moving vehicle.”

    “ **No.** Not **_you_ **.”

    “Ah, we reached that point.” McCree nodded sagely. “Anyone but me, eh? Not good ol’ McCree, thick as a post and slow as molasses running uphill with anything that didn’t involve shooting people, am I right?”

    Words ripped out of Gabriel’s grave and clawed their way up Reaper’s throat.

    “You were so _young_.”

    McCree’s expression turned pitying, almost regretful.

    “Yeah, I was,” he said, “but lots of folk think “young” is the same as “stupid”. I learned real quick, _jefe_ , in case you forgot. Never had to teach me the same trick twice.”

    He didn’t, Reaper remembered. There were plenty of “first times”, but never any repeats.

    “Deadlock was a warmup,” McCree said casually, conversationally. “Set a puppet up in power, but I was the one pulling the strings. It was just a game, then. I ought to thank you, you know. You showed me the bigger picture. Showed me what I could _really_ do.”

    “You loved Overwatch. You even answered the damn Recall.” Reaper remembered seeing McCree on the field, shouting to his teammates and killing Talon agents left and right.

    “Yeah, I did.” McCree smiled. “I loved what it could’ve been, if it weren’t for those idiots at the U.N. who couldn’t figure out what to do with y’all. They didn’t have the spine to see it through. Can’t go changing the world and quit halfway, you know?”

    “So you did all of _this_?” Reaper hissed, gesturing to the Talon base, to his perpetually dying body, to the last remains of the better days left in his head.

    “Sometimes you gotta clear the board and start over.” McCree shrugged. “Talon is just a stepping stone. A little impetus to get things started again.”

    “You pushed all of this to get them to put out the Recall.” Reaper realized in sudden, breathtaking epiphany. McCree gave him finger-guns.

    “I knew you’d get there eventually.” He smiled. “And we want you. Think of it as a redemption story.”

    “ _You_ want to recruit _me_ after what you did?” Reaper roared. “After what you ruined?!”

    McCree didn’t even flinch.

    “I gave things a little push at most,” he said. “Cut out some dead weight. Brought some things to light a little earlier than they would have come otherwise. Y’all made the choices you did yourselves.”

    “You won’t get away with this.” Reaper growled, halfway to becoming smoke and shadow.

    McCree gave him a sad smile, and a chill ran up Reaper’s incorporeal spine even as rage boiled in his heart.

    “I figured you’d say something like that,” he said. “Given the lengths you went to catch up with me. So I took precautions.”

    He hit a button and disappeared in a flash of light. Teleportation of some sort, Reaper realized. The security precautions suddenly flipped in his head; instead of protocol to keep others out, they suddenly became methods to keep someone _in_. The vents all sealed air-tight. He tried to shadow-step, but he had no idea where the bridge was, and there was nothing else for him to step onto out there.

    He was trapped. Completely trapped.

    “I didn’t want to have to do this,” McCree’s voice came over the antique phone’s speaker system. “Starving is a nasty way to go, and isolation’s even worse, but I’m not fool enough to pull a tiger’s tail and stick around to hear him roar.”

    “You goddamn fucking coward! **McCree**!” Reaper howled.

    “Here now, I’ll have you know it took a lot of guts to have met you face to face and confess all this to you. Could have just phoned it in, but I didn’t. I thought you deserved to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.”

    “I’m going to rip your heart out and force feed it to you, you little--”

    “Sorry, Reyes. It’s been a pleasure, but I got another meeting. I’ll miss you.”

    The phone went silent.

 

    He should have seen it coming. If not the betrayal, at least the trap. Gabriel cursed his blindness, the impatience of his temper at the end of the sting, the way he ruined himself for nothing. He let his body disintegrate and spread throughout the room, his consciousness fading with it.

 

 

_And then the phone on the desk rang._

 

 

    Gabriel pulled himself back together, literally and figuratively. He picked up the receiver.

    “ _Dios mio_ , what a blowhard.” Sombra’s voice rang out. “I thought he’d never shut up.”

    “Sombra?”

    “You ready to get out of here, Gabe? This place is tacky and depressing.”

    “You knew?”

    “Well, I do _now_. C’mon, you thought I was going to pass up a chance to find out who the mysterious Commander really was?”

    “You know what you’re getting into now?”

    “Yeah, if you’re ready to get out.”

    “What will it cost me?”

    “Nothing you aren’t already paying. I want this guy to go down. Pretending to be a hero… well. You’re the ticket to making it happen.”

    Reaper smiled behind his mask.

    “Deal.”

    The door opened.

 

* * *

 

 

    Sombra disconnected the mic, leaned back in her chair, and looked up at the tall figure behind her.

    “You’re a little bit of a bastard, you know that, right?” She said with a smile.

    McCree smiled back.

    “So it’s been said.”

    “He’s going to be gunning for you hard.”

    “Your money’s already been transferred. You don’t have to fake concern on my account.”

    “What, I can’t be concerned for a friend?”

    McCree raised an eyebrow.

    “In our line of work? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.”

    Sombra flashed him a wicked grin. He chuckled.

    “I’ll get him to go to ground, and try and keep him lying low for a while before the next stage.” She said.

    “Good work.” McCree nodded, turning to leave. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

 

* * *

 

   

    He walked down the halls, the sounds of his spurs and footsteps ringing in his ears.

    He gave it three, four months before Sombra tried to sell him out for real. Six on the outset, if Gabriel managed to focus through his temper to get a solid plan together.

    Then he’d finally give this world the heroes it deserved.


End file.
